Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning that (...) facilitate the access to education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood education. (shrink)

Jesus of Nazareth, like Socrates, left nothing behind written by himself. Yet, the records of his teaching indicate a rich interest in dialogic pedagogy, reflected in his use of the parable, primarily an oral genre, as a dialogic provocation. Working at the interface of pedagogy, theology and philosophy, this article explores the parable of the Good Samaritan from the perspective of dialogic pedagogy. It employs an analytical approach termed diacognition, developed from the notions of dialogue, position and cognition, to analyse (...) the moves within the parable and the teaching situation in which it is located. The article explores how Jesus engages the dialogue of and around the parable to position and reposition his interlocutor, provoking a re-cognition of what it means to love one’s neighbour. It concludes by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for the relation of meaning to knowing and doing. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between online dispute resolution (ODR) and trust. We discuss what trust is, why trust is important, and how trust develops. Our claim is that efforts to implement online dispute resolution on a site or service in a manner that promotes trust need to consider ODR as just one tool in a broader toolbox of trust-building tools and techniques. These techniques are amongst others marketing, education, trust seals, and transparency. By evaluating ODR in its proper context (...) as one component of a larger trust strategy, we can more accurately set expectations for its results and position our projects for success. (shrink)

This study tested a tool that could reveal children’s attitudes toward unpopular nonhuman animals through a content analysis of constructed clipart scenes arranged and described by elementary students. Pictures were analyzed for clipart choices, pictorial themes, themes of attitudes toward nonhuman animals, and other components of verbalized statements. Most students created scenes showing humans standing surrounded by animals. Boys made more statements concerning weapons, traps, or poison and about performing violent actions against animals than girls. Girls made more statements about (...) liking animals than boys. Ecologistic, naturalistic, humanistic, moralistic, and aesthetic themes were more common in the female participants’ verbalizations, while scientistic, utilitarian, dominionistic, negativistic, and neutralistic themes occurred more frequently in the male explanations. Both genders exhibited similar levels of “feminine” attitudes, but boys exhibited more “masculine” attitudes than girls. (shrink)

We evaluate the controls on production performance of the Wilrich tight gas sand play in West Central Alberta, and show that careful steering using 3D seismic to place the wellbore within the upper reservoir is the most important geophysical contribution to production outcomes. Geologic, geophysical, drilling, and production data from more than 20 wells are used in the analysis. The completion and production parameters within the study area are relatively invariant, creating a control experiment relative to other productivity factors. We (...) thus isolate the effects of varying bottom hole pressures, porosity, wellbore length, number of stimulations, mud gas response, gamma ray measurements while drilling, mud weight, curvature, amplitude versus offset, amplitude versus azimuth, velocity versus azimuth, and position of the horizontal wellbore within the reservoir. These variables are treated separately and in a multivariate fashion to determine their relative and combined effect on the productivity of the wells. Several methods of statistical evaluation are used to test confidence in the results. The Wilrich sand is approximately 20-m thick, and it was expected that the multistage fracture stimulation would have minimized the importance of vertical permeability variations by adequately accessing the entire vertical reservoir section. Such is not the case; precise placement of the wellbore in the most permeable stratigraphy of the thin reservoir is of material importance. The pressure and porosity strongly affect the production performance, but to a lesser degree than vertical position within the reservoir. This suggests that stratigraphic concerns as they relate to permeability variation can be critical, even in thin fracture-stimulated reservoirs. Interesting relationships were observed between the AVAz and curvature measures, but neither they nor the AVO or VVAz attributes yielded statistically significant correlations to the production data. (shrink)